2017 October 22

I’ve not been blogging much lately, because so much of my time has been taken up with taking the Mechatronics course at UCSC. I’d love to blog about what I’m doing in the course, but they use the same assignments every year, and I don’t want my solutions to replace student ones.

I will post a picture of the beacon-detector board that I soldered up for Lab 2, as reverse-engineering the design from the photo would be harder than doing the design from scratch:

This is a two-chip solution, using eight op amps. It is definitely overkill for the problem of detecting an IR LED flashing at 2kHz, while rejecting ones flashing at 1.5kHz or 2.5kHz. The Molex connector for power is a bit of a pain, as its pitch is wider than 0.1″. I ended up having to drill extra holes in the PermaProtoboard to accommodate it.

I did this design with very conventional approaches (though not the ones that the course was encouraging) and got a filter whose measured characteristics closely matched the theoretical ones over a wide frequency range:

The active filter does a good job of responding to 2 kHz while rejecting other frequencies. I initially had made the Q higher (that is, made the peak narrower), but the filter started oscillating.The increasing response at frequencies above 10kHz is expected from an active filter—but the problem is not significant here.

I also characterized the filter including the infrared emission and reception:

The infrared signal here was strong enough to cause clipping around the central peak, which reduced somewhat the discrimination between the desired 2kHz and the undesired 1.5kHz and 2.5kHz. This plot is from an earlier version of the design—the one that had some oscillation.

After building this conventional solution, which takes 8 op amps, I also built (just on a breadboard) a 3-op-amp solution, which I have not yet tested in the lab, only at home with different beacon sources. I don’t plan to solder it up, though, as I plan to use the digital beacon detector that I built over the summer, which has been tested and seems more reliable than the analog ones (as well as giving 8 channels of detection, rather than just one).

2017 August 15

In Beacon detector board, I introduced the hardware for the IR beacon detector, and in Digital tone detection with Goertzel’s algorithm, I discussed the algorithm used for detecting a 2kHz signal in a noisy background. In this post I’ll talk about the software for interfacing the board to microcontrollers as if it were a standard peripheral device.

When I was designing the hardware, I had to choose between providing a UART interface, an SPI interface, or an I2C interface. At one point, I considered including all three, since I had just enough pins to do that and plenty of board space for connectors.

My son urged me to use a UART interface, since asynchronous communication is much easier work with than the two synchronous interfaces—there are no tight timing constraints. UART communications tends to be slow (115200 baud is a common top speed, resulting in a maximum of about 11.5–12.8kbytes/second transferred), and the two sides must agree on the baud rate to within 2.5%. But there are no latency constraints—you can respond to a request whenever you are finally ready—so there are no worries if you need to wait for a timer task to complete before communicating. The main downside of a UART interface (besides the usually low speed) is that it is a one-to-one interface. Two pins are needed for each UART a microcontroller uses, while the synchronous interfaces provide shared bus communication.

I knew that I could do a UART interface and for the small amounts of data I needed to communicate (10–75 bytes every 60th of a second, or 600–4500 bytes/s) it would be fast enough. But I wanted a challenge that would help me learn something new, so I decided to do a synchronous interface. Of the two choices supported by the Teensy LC hardware, SPI and I2C, the SPI interface looked the simpler to implement in software, as the timing seemed a little less challenging, and there was a FIFO that could be loaded with several bytes of information to transfer, reducing the timing demands. (In retrospect, I2C may have been easier—I’ve not tried it, though, so there may be some unexpected challenges.)

I created the board with only one I/O port (other than the USB port used for programming the board), the SPI0 4-wire interface using pins CS=D10=PTC4, MOSI=D11=PTC6, MISO=D12=PTC7, SCK=D13=PTC5. I used a 6-pin right-angle header at the edge of the board, so that I would be able to use a ribbon connector to connect to another microcontroller. The order of the pins is the same as Digilent uses for their PMOD connector—an arbitrary choice, but there does not seem to be a commonly accepted standard for SPI connections.

The choice of pins was the first mistake I made in the SPI design—I should have used SPI1 instead of SPI0. In reading the reference manual for the KL26 chip that is the basis for the Teensy LC, the SPI FIFO is only implemented for SPI1, and not for SPI0. Also, the legal SPI clock speeds are different for the two interfaces: SPI0 is clocked off the bus clock (default 24MHz on the Teensy LC) and SPI1 off the system clock (default 48MHz). The external clock SCK is allowed to go from 0Hz to ¼ the module clock, so 6MHz for SPI0 and 12MHz for SPI1.

The lack of a FIFO on SPI0 made the timing for loading the transmit buffer a little tricky. The hardware has two registers for the transmit: the shift register used for serializing a byte and the transmit buffer that holds the next byte to transfer to the serial register. If the transmit buffer is not loaded in time for the serial shifting, then the SPI interface will duplicate the previous byte, messing up communication.

The Teensyduino library contains SPI master software, but not SPI slave software. I was wondering about the reason for that before I started my coding, but I quickly realized why—the timing for SPI is almost entirely under control of the master and the slave is constrained to respond at times specified by the master. The most common SPI protocols for peripherals consist of the master sending a 1-byte (or longer) command to the slave and getting a response back in the next byte slot(s). This gives the slave about half a clock period to interpret the command and prepare the response. With a 1MHz SCK, that gives the processor about 500ns to set up the response. That’s plenty of time for an all-hardware system, but is a very tight constraint for a software implementation. In fact, given that the interrupt latency on the KL26 can be about 800ns, it is an impossible constraint—I don’t even know that I need to send a byte, much less figure out what it is, in the available time. The more complicated I2C interface allows a slave to stretch out the clock when it can’t respond in time, but the SPI interface doesn’t allow the slave to change the clock rate.

So I couldn’t use the most common SPI interface protocol of command followed by immediate response. I had a few choices of workarounds for the latency problem:

Have a standardized packet of material that is sent independent of what the master does. This seems to be the solution used by SPI slave libraries others have written for the Teensy boards (not part of the standard Teensyduino library). It allows high throughput, especially if DMA is used to load the transmit information, but is not very flexible. It is not a commonly used protocol on SPI peripherals.

Require the master to wait before asking for the response bytes. This is very flexible and allows the SPI bus to run at maximum speed during transfers, but is not really in the spirit of a synchronous interface—the slave should respond at a standardized time, and the master should not have to know how long it will take the slave to be ready to send.

Send a dummy byte in the slot after the request so that I have a full byte time (8 SCK periods) instead of half a bit time to get the right information ready. A disadvantage is that the throughput is reduced—the dummy bytes take up bus time without communicating useful information. If the protocol calls for a 1-byte command and a 1-byte response, then each transfer would take 3 byte times. (A 1-byte command and an n-byte response takes n+2 byte times.)

I ended up using a slight variant of the dummy-byte approach: I allow the master to send new commands before the first response comes back. Dummy bytes are only added when there are no real bytes to send, so a series of n commands requesting 1-byte responses could be sent in a row, with the total time for the transfer taking n+2 byte times—the first two slots of which the slave is sending dummy bytes, and the next n are the requested data.

To make this protocol work, I had to ensure that the SPI interrupt priority is higher than any other interrupts in the program, in particular, higher than the PIT timer that I was using for the 15kHz sampling frequency. This means that the SPI transmissions will introduce jitter into the ADC sampling—I’ve not yet determined how much of a problem this will be, but I suspect it won’t be much of a problem, since it will only affect one or two samples in the 250-sample filter block. The default interrupt priority on the KL26 processor in the Teensy LC is for all interrupts to be at the highest priority, so I had to lower the PIT priority rather than raising the SPI priority.

The basic notion is that I keep the SPI transmit buffer always full. When there is a transmit-buffer-empty interrupt, I load the buffer from a software FIFO I maintain, or with a dummy byte (0xff) if there is nothing in the FIFO. The responses to a command are loaded into the FIFO. As long as the SPI interrupt response (including interpreting the command and any FIFO loading or popping) takes less than the time of one byte, the protocol runs smoothly. With commands that can send up to 4-byte responses, I was able to run SCK up 1.25MHz without losing synchronization.

My current, minimal command set for the beacon detector has the following commands:

Freeze the information from filter so that all subsequent commands refer to the same set of data. Return 1 on success, 0 on failure. (The failure is only possible if the request is sent too soon after a reset of the beacon detector board.)

Report which channel has the highest power (1-byte: 0xff if no beacon detected, otherwise 0..7)

Report the estimated angle of the beacon in 0.1° units (2-bytes: 0..3599)

Report the power in the max-power channel (4-bytes: unsigned int)

I could also report the power in specific channels and the power from an alternative (3kHz instead of 2kHz) filter for each channel, which would be another 64 bytes of information, but I’ve not implemented those commands yet. The minimal set I currently have responds with 8 bytes of information, so takes 10 byte times for a burst of communication. With the highest clock rate I’ve gotten to work (SCK=1.25MHz), a full packet takes 64µs, which would interfere with only one or two samples of the 15kHz sampling.

I may play around with different command sets after I get another board programmed as a master to communicate with the beacon detector and determine what information I really need from the beacon detector. One possibility is to use just a single 2-byte response that encodes everything but the power: that would allow a 4-byte-time packet (25.6 µs).

Setting up the SPI software ran into all the usual problems with setting up a peripheral on a Kinetis ARM processor—there are many registers that need to be set up correctly, and nothing works until they are all right:

Turn on the SPI module clock: SIM_SCGC4 |= SIM_SCGC4_SPI0

Set the SPI control registers SPI0_C1 and SPI0_C2 for 4-wire SPI with CPOL=1, CPHA=1, 8-bit mode, interrupt on receiving a byte or on transmit buffer empty.

Set up the isr to interpret the recieved bytes and keep the transmit buffer full.

Configure the 4 pins used to be ALT 2 (SPI0) rather than the default GPIO.

Set the priorities using NVIC_SET_PRIORITY(IRQ_SPI0, 0) and NVIC_SET_PRIORITY(IRQ_PIT_CH1, 64). The KL26 processors have only 4 interrupt priority levels that are multiples of 64. Lower numbers are higher priority.

Enable the interrupts with NVIC_ENABLE_IRQ(IRQ_SPI0)

I debugged the SPI interface using the protocol and logic analyzer tools in the Analog Discovery 2. I found the user documentation for these tools really awful (almost no information), but I managed to get things working by trial and error (except for the “sensor” script options for the SPI protocol tool—that always resulted in the spinning beachball and force-quitting Waveforms 2015). I initially tested with the “Master” tab of the protocol tool, but I fairly quickly switched to using the “Custom” tool which allowed me to set up more complicated sequences of reads and writes, though eventually I simplified back to writes that could be done with the “Master” tab.

The “debug” mode of the protocol tool sets up the logic analyzer to see the signals, but then doesn’t provide the decoding of the protocol in the protocol tool—one has to go to the logic analyzer to set up the triggering, switch to the protocol tool to send the stimulus, then switch back to the logic analyzer to see the results. It is possible to get the protocol tool and the logic analyzer tool in different windows (double-click on the tab for the tool you want in a new window), but my screen is too small for showing both windows in sufficient resolution at once.

To see when the interrupt service routine for the SPI was active I added CORE_PIN1_PORTSET = CORE_PIN1_BITMASK to the beginning of the isr and CORE_PIN1_PORTCLEAR = CORE_PIN1_BITMASK, and used some wirewrap wire to get the pin 1 signal out to the logic analyzer. I’d not added test points for the unused pins, but because the Teensy board is socketed with female headers, it was easy to wrap a wire around the pin before pushing the board into the female headers, and use a loose header pin to connect the other end of the wire to DIO6 of the logic analyzer.

Here is a result of a test of sending the 4 commands in a row in an 11-byte frame, to make sure that the dummy bytes occur in the right places (in the first 2 and last slots of the 11-byte frame):

As it turns out, the end of the isr for the 4-byte response comes 0.4µs later than it should if there had not been any other bytes already in the queue. Indeed, if I start with the “4” command, things just barely work, because the isr routine starts a little sooner. The 6.8µs delay to the end of the isr routine suggests to me that the maximum safe rate for SCK is only about 1.15MHz, not 1.25MHz. I’ll have to do a lot of testing with many data packets, to see what rate is really safe without intermittent errors. That will have to wait until I’ve written a program to act as the master (unless I can figure out why the “sensor” script keeps crashing Waveforms 2015).

I’m planning to sit in on CMPE 118/L (Mechatronics) this fall, and so I started looking over some of the material for the course from previous years. One exercise involved designing a “beacon detector” that signals when it sees an infrared signal modulated with a 2kHz square wave. The exercise calls for an all-analog solution (phototransistor, transimpedance amplifier, active filter, rectifier, peak detector, …), which I plan to do when the time comes, but I got intrigued by the idea of doing an almost purely digital design. That was the motivation for the Goertzel filter blog post.

I decided to take the digital design further and make a beacon detector that not only detects the 2kHz IR beacon, but also indicates what direction it is in. To do this, I wanted 8 phototransistors around a circle, with one every 45°. One can get a crude estimate of the angle from just which detector gets the strongest signal, but with wide-angle sensors one should be able to get finer estimates by looking at the ratio of the signals from two adjacent channels.

Because I was deliberately going for minimal analog design as an exercise, I used just a phototransistor and a pullup resistor for each channel, and a Teensy LC board for all the processing. I chose SFH325FA side-look phototransistors, because they provide a nice, cubical package that I thought would make them easier to align. They are surface-mount components, but with a 2.54mm pitch for the two terminals, they aren’t much harder to solder than through-hole parts.

For testing, I soldered one of the SFH325FA phototransistors to a pair of male header pins. This allowed me to experiment with different pullup resistor sizes in different lighting conditions and at different distances from an IR emitter.

My experimentation with different pullup resistors indicated that I could not operate in full sunlight, no matter what size pullup resistor I used—when the pullup was small enough that the phototransistor had sufficient voltage across it in full sunlight, the signal from the IR beacon was too small to be useful. With AC-coupled amplifiers, I could have made it work, but I was committed to nearly pure digital solution. If I had sunlight nearby, but the phototransistor itself was shaded, then I could go up to 22kΩ for the pullup without problems. The limiting factor was then that a very close beacon could saturate the detector, making it hard to determine power ratios. I ended up choosing 22kΩ as my pullup, as I wanted to detect beacons from up to 2m away.

With a 22kΩ pullup and a strong signal, I can get a very clean “shark’s fin” waveform, because of the capacitance of the phototransistor acting with the resistor as a low-pass filter. This low-pass filtering helps remove aliasing artifacts from the sampling by the analog-to-digital filter.

Behind each phototransistor I placed an LED, to indicate which channel had the maximum signal. I charlieplexed the LEDs, so that I needed only 4 I/O pins for the 8 LEDs (I could encode up to 12 LEDs with 4 charlieplex wires). I used WP710A10SGC green LEDs for the indicators, because I had a lot of them around, but it would have been better to use an amber LED with a wide-angle, diffuse case, as the green indicators are only clearly visible over a fairly narrow angle. The current-limiting resistors I used would keep the current low enough even with a low-forward-voltage red LED.

I also added an RGB LED to indicate the overall state—I used a common-anode one, because my son had a lot of them with diffuse cases, which are best for an indicator that needs to be seen from any angle. The RGB LEDs were part of an unidentified lot from China, so I don’t have a part number or specs for them. I hooked them up to PWM pins, so that I could adjust the brightness and color as needed.

I also designed in a connector for SPI connection, so that the board could be used a slave peripheral of another microcontroller. I used Eagle on my old laptop to design the PCB (I know that in Need to find new PC board software and PCB CAD tools I said that I would be trying to switch to KiCAD or Diptrace, but I was lazy and stuck with what I already knew how to use).

I sent the design to Seeedstudio to make the PCB—like many of the Chinese firms that cater to hobbyists, they had a sale in July of boards up to 10cm×10cm for only $5. Of course, it cost me another $21 for shipping with DHL, because I was too impatient to wait for Chinese air mail (and not trusting enough of the reliability). I chose Seeedstudio because they had the best user interface to their design-rule check, and at least as good pricing as anyone else.

The boards arrived quite quickly—only 8 days from order to delivery. Here is what they look like:

The back of the board has some documentation to remind me what is connected where.

The front of the board has relatively little documentation.

The boards are 8cm×8cm, fitting comfortably within both the cheap manufacturing limit and the Eagle free-version size limit. I made them this big so that the Teensy LC board would fit without interfering with mounting holes (for M2 and M3 screws) and a central hole for attaching the board to a servo arm.

Getting a good right angle for the surface-mount phototransistors took some practice:

My first solder joint for the SFH325FA phototransistor tilted the transistor substantially, because the solder underneath formed a wedge. I reworked it a couple of times and finally got something sort of acceptable.

By the fifth phototransistor, I had worked out a technique that seemed to hold the phototransistor cleanly at a right angle. There is probably not much solder underneath the phototransistor, but the large wedge behind the phototransistor should provide sufficient mechanical strength.

Here are pictures of the populated board:

The back of the board does not look very different after being populated. I put one M3 screw in the bottom M3 screw hole, in order to see how compatible the screw hole design is with the screw head.

The top of the board, when populated shows how close channels 0 and 7 come to the Teensy board.

Here the board is on (powered through the USB cable), detecting an IR beacon about a meter away in the direction of channel 4. The green LED by the channel indicates the direction, and the green RGB LED indicates a strong signal.

I put the header pins on the pullup resistors, so that I could record the signal seen by the analog-to-digital converters. Unfortunately, the signal is much noisier than I expected:

The large spikes are at 15kHz, and probably correspond to noise injected by the ADC sampling.

I turned off the beacon and looked just at the noise spikes, using the 10× probe on the oscilloscope to get better bandwidth. I sampled at 100MHz and averaged 1000 traces to get a clean view of the signal (the triggering was set far enough from the background level that only fairly large spikes were captured, but close enough that the 1000 frames were gathered as quickly as possible).

The pulses are very short (2–3 µs), so almost certainly correspond to the charging of the sampling capacitor. After looking at this waveform, I changed my sample time on the ADC to 2µs (it had been 1µs) to reduce the noise in what the ADC reports.

This post has gotten more than long enough, though I still have a couple of things that should be added: a schematic diagram of the board and a plot of the reported angle vs actual angle.

The schematics from Eagle are really ugly, so I’ve been thinking about redrawing them with SchemeIt—perhaps that can be a subsequent post.

The reported angle vs. actual angle plot is going to require building a jig that allow me to set the angle precisely. I tried jury-rigging something out of Lego today, but the result had too much slop—the board could not be reliably set level with the IR emitter at a fixed angle. The OED-EL-1L2 5mm IR emitter does fit in the middle hole of a Lego Technic brick, so I using Lego to align the IR emitter was attractive. I may have to make something out of wood and MDF (medium-density fiberboard) for a more solid test jig. The M3 screw holes will allow me to attach the board firmly to MDF with standoffs, and I can drill holes in Lego bricks to make a stand for the IR emitter.